Description:
French-colonial Tunisia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed shifting concepts of identity, including varying theories of ethnic essentialism, a drive toward "modernization," and imperialist interpretations of science and medicine. As French colonizers worked to realize ideas of a "modern" city and empire, they undertook a program to significantly alter the physical and social realities by which the people of Tunisia lived, often in ways that continue to influence life today.
Medical Imperialism in French North Africa demonstrates the ways in which diverse members of the Jewish community of Tunis received, rejected, or reworked myriad imperial projects devised to foster the social, corporeal, and moral "regeneration" of their community. Buttressed by the authority of science and medicine, regenerationist schemes such as urban renewal projects and public health reforms were deployed to destroy and recast the cultural, social, and political lives of Jewish colonial subjects. Richard C. Parks expands on earlier scholarship to examine how notions of race, class, modernity, and otherness shaped these efforts. Looking at such issues as the plasticity of identity, the collaboration and contention between French and Tunisian Jewish communities, Jewish women's negotiation of social power relationships in Tunis, and the razing of the city's Jewish quarter, Parks fills the gap in current literature by focusing on the broader transnational context of French actions in colonial Tunisia.Review Quotes: "Park's Medical Imperialism is a very welcome contribution to the study of eugenics, imperialism and religious and ethnic identities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. . . . While Parks's work provides an interesting glimpse into a little known field of French colonial history, this book also raises broader questions that will be of interest to scholars of public health, empire and the state. By focusing on how the project of national regeneration played out in the recently established French protectorate in Tunisia, Parks provides readers with a window into broader scholarly debates about identity, biopolitics and the nature of colonial rule."--Jessica Lynne Pearson, Social History of Medicine-- (8/1/2018 12:00:00 AM)